Storage associated with a system whose operating system is not running may be referred to as a cold image. Recovery of one or more portions of a cold image may be desired. However, access to a file system of a volume or other storage unit of a cold image may be a challenge. Additionally, applications may store data in application specific formats, including database specific formats, mail system formats, and/or other application specific formats. Such application specific formats may be difficult to parse or interpret without the use of the application itself. Furthermore, application data for a single application instance may be stored in a plurality of data structures and may be stored in different formats and in different locations. For example, a database may have multiple log files and/or other files, such as control files. Thus, accessing a cold image without the use of an associated operating system and/or application, may make it difficult to identify, parse, perform a full recovery of application data, and/or perform a partial or granular recovery of application data.
Moreover, with increased use of virtualization, there may be a growing number of virtual machine image files, such as for example, Virtual Machine DisK format (VMDK) files. These virtual machine image files may store data associated with a virtual machine. It may be desirable to access one or more portions of data of a virtual machine, or of applications of a virtual machine, when the virtual machine is not running. However, identifying, parsing, and/or recovering one or more files associated with a virtual machine that is not running may be not conventionally feasible.
In view of the foregoing, it may be understood that there are significant problems and shortcomings associated with current cold image data recovery technologies.